Micro:bit and the Internet of Things

Last week I announced that I will be returning to California and a new leadership position on the Internet of Things at Arm - more about that soon! 

I have had an incredible journey over the past 18 months working on something that will have an impact for decades to come - the technology education of young people. We’re living in a time of tremendous technological and societal change as the barriers to access technology disappear. It’s our duty as industry leaders, engineers and educators to make sure that all children across the globe have access to basic digital skills and the ability to innovate with technology. Recently I heard Al Gore speak at Slush in Helsinki, where he concluded that “the sustainability of planet earth is the biggest business opportunity of our lifetimes”, and I certainly believe young people should be equipped for the challenge! 

Thanks to the forward looking executive team at Arm, I was given the chance to found and lead a non-profit organization for technology education around the BBC micro:bit [1] in the summer of 2016. The BBC started the micro:bit as a project when looking for ways to bring digital skills to young people in the UK 35 years after the original BBC micro. This ambitious project together with 30 partners from across industry and education, delivered just under 1 million micro:bit devices to every grade 7 student in the UK (11-12 year olds) in the spring of 2016. Thanks to the generous help of our Founding Partners [2] we were able to quickly form an organization that could bring the micro:bit to educators and children around the world in the fall of 2016. Since then, we’ve launched the micro:bit in over 50 countries, reached millions of children, served over 200M web requests and achieved national school roll-outs in the UK, Iceland, Croatia and Singapore. Thanks to our incredible team and community, the micro:bit has become a global movement for youth technology education. Here are some of my key approaches and learnings: 

1. Vision is the key to any organization, in particular a startup trying to reach lofty goals. The first thing I did when starting to work on the Micro:bit Foundation was to create a compelling vision - “In the future, every child will be an inventor”. My own technology path started at age 8 with a Commodore 64, resulting in my first company at age 15. This is something that deeply moves me and everyone involved with micro:bit. Vision isn’t just a marketing gimmick, it has to be personal and compelling. This is the cornerstone that I’ve used to build everything around, my own motivation, a great team and strategy, right down to the articles of association. 
2. As a tech entrepreneur, I appreciate the power of startups to scale potentially disruptive new things fast and with minimal resources. We decided to design a non-profit social enterprise that operates like a tech startup. How does that work? Well, there are two main mechanisms. First, each time a micro:bit is purchased, a small amount goes to support the operation of the Foundation. By the end of 2017 we achieved financial self sufficiency with a staff of 21! Secondly, everyone in the organization is measured by non-profit social goals, ensuring that the focus stays on education.
3. One of our biggest challenges was how to scale micro:bit across the whole developed world in just over a year. We took a non-traditional approach for a hardware device and let our ecosystem scale for us. We acted as the core of a large ecosystem of 100s of organizations working with micro:bit around the world (this was modeled after the Arm Ecosystem). Our job was to arrange global certification and distribution, provide a scalable and easily translatable end-to-end platform, support, and finally promotion and development in key territories. Initially this was organized entirely from the UK by the super effective Philip Meitiner, but as we grew also regional coordinators were added in N. America (Hal Speed), Latin America (Jose Scodiero) and Asia Pacific (Waris Candra). 
4. Management teams really matter, and with micro:bit already having a great community in the UK, we were able to bring in super skilled and motivated people. Together with CTO Jonny Austin (from Arm), we built a management team including Stephen Doel (COO, from Arm as a volunteer) and Gareth James (Chief of Education, from The IET). Later we were joined by Kavita Kapoor as our full time COO and Hal Speed as our Chief Strategy Officer (from Dell). This team did a tremendous job using vision to recruit and motivate their teams, and keeping up with the tremendous growth and resulting change we experienced. 
5. We designed our culture and way of working around the team. We built a culture that incorporated my startup background, parts of the Arm culture, and ways of working from the education sector. One part of that culture was a totally distributed way of working. Our management team was already distributed across the UK, Finland and the US with staff in the UK, Brazil and Hong Kong. Likewise as we hired quickly from the community our UK staff was distributed from the south coast all the way to Scotland! The great thing about this was everyone was equal, there was no office where a subset of people made decisions around the coffee table. However making this works takes a lot more effort to build personal connections between team members and a common culture across the org. Finally, as we expected staff to be flexible, we decided to be just as flexible in return by implementing 1 day a week of paid education volunteer activity and an open vacation policy. 

You might be wondering how micro:bit relates to the Internet of Things. Well first, micro:bit is actually a brilliant connected IoT device [3]. For the first time ever, we managed to make the embedded development UX so easy that young children and non-technical adults could do useful programming in a couple minutes. In order to achieve this, a lot of really interesting technology was developed and integrated. This includes a script runtime adaptation that allows JavaScript and Python to be run on just 16 KB of RAM, easy programming as a USB flash drive, in-browser compilation, and the use of Bluetooth for mobile integration and peer-to-peer radio networking. 

Micro:bit also has wide reaching ramifications for the developers of intelligent devices and solutions in the future. By providing physical computing to all children across entire national school systems globally, we’re dramatically increasing the potential pool of scientists, engineers and developers. Most importantly, this approach reaches girls and disadvantaged children from rural areas and developing countries that might not normally consider a tech career. I think of physical computing as a journey. Micro:bit is getting primary and secondary aged children started with technology invention and coding. Many of those children will become Makers in the next 5-10 years as they go into high school and university using platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Finally, in a decade many of those Makers will be solving problems with intelligent embedded systems, AI powered services and robotics that we can’t even imagine yet.

Zach Shelby

More reading

[1] About the Foundation, https://microbit.org/about/

[2] Meet the micro:bit, https://microbit.org/guide/

[3] Micro:bit Developer Community, https://tech.microbit.org/